It’s the Pitts: Words matter

By: Lee Pitts

It’s been my general observation people who have something really good to sell aren’t the best at marketing, and people who are great at marketing often don’t have anything good to sell.

So it is with ranchers. We have a really great product to sell, but we aren’t the best at marketing. In fact, we need a complete marketing makeover. We are still living in the Marlboro cowboy age, while even America’s saloons are going smokeless. 

Our heroes are John Wayne, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, but if one mentions those names to today’s millennials they’ll say in unison, “Who?”

The secret to marketing these days is to confuse the public by never calling something by what it really is. For example, if a wolf kills a rancher’s calves it’s not cold-blooded murder, it is a livestock depredation incident.

See how much nicer this sounds?

Every time I read or hear of an example of this tickle talk, I write it down, and I’ve acquired quite a collection. Shopping is retail therapy. A toupee is a hair replacement system, and state and federal governments are nontraditional organized crime. 

Due to so many divorces, weddings are now being referred to as temporary commitment ceremonies. Dogs that are crossbred mutts are now dogs of undetermined origin. People no longer sleep on mattresses but sleep systems, and illegal aliens are now guest workers.

A person who is fat is differently sized, and a person who is short is gravitationally challenged. If a person plans their motor trips by stopping at truck stops, now known as travel plazas, they are engaging in timed voiding.

A used car is a certified pre-owned vehicle. An undertaker is an after-life director. An elderly person in an assisted care facility is an undead corpse, and a hooker is a low-cost provider of relationship management. 

Even the military gets in on the word game. I’m told Navy Seals refer to night as one cycle of darkness. I’m the most politically INCORRECT person in the world, but even around our house we refer to the kitchen as the burn unit.

Amidst all of this politically correct talk, we in the cattle business are still using words like slaughterhouse, manure and fat. 

I know it would make my grandpa rotate horizontally in his subterranean post-life enclosure to hear me say this, but I think we should be transitioning away from the word “cowboy.” 

The Marlboro Man doesn’t sell cigarettes anymore, and media personalities with decision-making disorders have assigned too much negative feedback to the word cowboy. They consider cowboys barbaric, and it’s not because they string barbwire. This is probably another word we should reimagine.

I hate to be verbally repetitive, but it’s probably time to vocationally relocate, disemploy, deselect and nonrenew the cowboy. It just carries too much excess baggage. Perhaps something like vehicularly housed, non-physically challenged or producer of non-scented organic beef would confuse our image enough. 

Or perhaps, one prefers an outdoor product specialist or biomass conversion technologist who watches over biomass converters, heretofore known as cows.

Better yet, we need to find a job description including the two magic words, so how does sustainable environmentalist sound? Or, sustainable agrarian product environmentalist and maintainer of sustainable open space. Too long? Want something a little more catchy? How about fabricator of non-carbohydrates or provider of environmental services?

Henceforth, Angus should be known as cattle of color. A cow which was raped by a bull and got pregnant has been infected with progeny and any antibiotics a producer gives to save an animal’s life shall be referred to as universal cattle medicines (UCMs).

I know I’m just an intellectually unremarkable keyboard jockey with an appearance deficit, cranial deforestation and a recto-cranial insertion, but I really do think ranchers are going to have to undergo a complete marketing makeover. 

We tend to put forth a face which is overly Caucasian and chronologically challenged, while we need to focus on an image which is more feminine and more representative of humankind. 

To be quite frank, we’re perceived as a bunch of old male carnivorous geezers. To really confuse our customers, we should henceforth be known as non-vegan persons of cow. 

Both the product we produce and the people who produce it aren’t old, just finely aged.